5 ms·

Red Hat does not have any "for-fee bolt-on addons", everything we ship is open source (or will be soon after acquisition of a closed-source company). Respondin

Red Hat does not have any "for-fee bolt-on addons", everything we ship is open source (or will be soon after acquisition of a closed-source company). Responding to some of the other comments, Red Hat revenue is nearly all from providing enterprise support for completely open source software. This is critically different from "services", ie consulting. These are yearly contracts that provide clients insurance if/when they have a production issue, a new major vulnerability is disclosed, etc, that someone knows the technology from the ground up and also knows the details of their deployment and can get them back into a good state. Our support+engineering teams are top notch, so retaining customers year over year is relatively easy. I work in Red Hat Consulting, which is a much smaller share of overall revenue. It doesn't scale nearly as well, since you only get revenue periodically for weeks to months at a time, with a lot of overhead to sell and manage assignments.

aquaticsunset 8y ago
To say "everything" Red Hat ships being open source isn't quite true. There's a lot of proprietary code floating around, especially in the supporting infrastructure. When a product is put together, the upstream sources are bundled together and released - often behind the paywall. Paul Cormier has it right - "We're an enterprise software company with an open source development model". Not an open source company. However, you're correct. Red Hat's value prop is in top notch support.
- SSLy 8y ago
  The only software that redhat "sells" that is not open source is: RHN and insights. Former would be pointless to open, the latter is virtually a service offering anyway.
cat199 8y ago
apologies - I nearly added a parenthetical that these were typically open source under a different name if bolt-on (e.g. 389 vs directory, etc). will edit.

aquaticsunset 8y ago

To say "everything" Red Hat ships being open source isn't quite true. There's a lot of proprietary code floating around, especially in the supporting infrastructure. When a product is put together, the upstream sources are bundled together and released - often behind the paywall. Paul Cormier has it right - "We're an enterprise software company with an open source development model". Not an open source company. However, you're correct. Red Hat's value prop is in top notch support.

SSLy 8y ago
The only software that redhat "sells" that is not open source is: RHN and insights. Former would be pointless to open, the latter is virtually a service offering anyway.

cat199 8y ago

apologies - I nearly added a parenthetical that these were typically open source under a different name if bolt-on (e.g. 389 vs directory, etc). will edit.